An Engineer’s Code of Ethics
summary
Claims that companies leak millions of records in hacks and that Cambridge Analytica harvested user profiles sit beside a counted "90 plus incidents" from one year and a cited $5 billion FTC fine for Facebook, while an emissions scandal leads to a Volkswagen engineer jailed — concrete numbers, legal penalties, and real-world consequences. Details about smart assistants listening, targeted ad-surveillance, and proposals for change in culture, leadership, regulation and public education determine whether this talk reports solutions that were built and whether they actually worked.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (52)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:52We messed up!
- 2:32How did we get here?
- 3:0590+ incidents
- 3:39Technology and election interference
- 4:20Fake news - Misinformation
- 5:16Brexit happened inside Facebook
- 6:01Smart Home
- 6:32For advertising purposes
- 7:08Patterns
- 8:02Invisible
- 8:34Volkswagen Emissions Scandal
- 9:18The Problem
- 9:57Culture
- 10:18Silicon Valley
- 10:37Disrupt the market
- 11:00Move fast and break things
- 11:39The future is private
- 12:39Why do they want to merge their platforms?
- 13:31How do they plan to encrypt our messages?
- 13:58FB scans the message for malicious content
- 14:59Focus on the positives
- 16:20Leaders are quick to recognize what they're doing right, while being oblivious to the things causing them to fail.
- 18:57Head in the sand
- 20:05Regulators don't know how tech companies work
- 20:40If you don't charge money for facebook, how do you make money?
- 21:23billion dollars fine to Facebook from FTC
- 24:03Uneducated public
- 24:13People don't understand how valuable their data is for companies like Twitter and Facebook
- 24:26People don't know how to keep themselves secure on the internet
- 24:36Who cares about my data.
- 25:45Convenience Privacy
- 26:17What we could do?
- 26:29Let's work together to solve this problem
- 26:41What's ethical leadership?
- 27:11Lead by example
- 27:32Leading by example is the best way to ensure an ethical business.
- 27:43Promotion of good conduct
- 27:54Leaders need to be willing to intervene informally to steer behavior in their organizations and resolve emerging problems.
- 28:19Define and align your values.
- 28:35Hire people with similar values
- 28:45Promote open communication
- 29:20Beware of bias
- 30:18No tolerance for ethical violations
- 31:23Be responsible for the work you put into the world.
- 31:35Value impact over form.
- 31:53Accept full responsibility for your own work.
- 32:04Ethics in University
- 34:41Educate the public
- 35:42Privacy is a fundamental human right.
- 35:57We have a duty toward the humans on the other end of the screen, to build a product they can love and trust.
- 36:16Thank you!
related talks
36mAn engineer's code of ethics
37mEthics in Software Engineering - Should We Care
30mOrganizing for your Ethical Principles
47mThe Ethics of Software - some practical considerations
50mBeing an ethical software engineer
42mInfosec, AI and ethics – new models for a secure future
43mEthical Engineering
40mEthics in Computing